On October 10th, ARC hosted the first Loft Hour event of the 2024/25 academic year with the support of the Dean’s Office of the Division of Arts and Humanities. The program featured readings by Tehmina Khan (College Writing Program) and Fae Myenne Ng (Ethnic Studies) in conversation with Natalia Brizuela (Film & Media).
Tehmina Khan read her poems, Nothing, Standing for Water, Twice As Hard, and Mothers of Gaza, each highlighting a narrative of key unjust events in America and global conflicts. From Standing for Water, she writes, “But we walk in our own light as we weave our voices together in a multicolored tapestry and speak a symphony of languages, mathematical equations, stories, prayers, to each other, to the divine, for water, for the water inside all of us.” During the Q&A, Tehmina shared, “I think about poems as a container for our humanity, as a portal for empathy, particularly in a world gone wrong….I spent a lot of time learning. I worked really hard to get that Urdu that I never had…and having other languages, whether they’re mine in terms of heritage or not, gave me space to express myself and imagine myself outside the Anglo-American language.”
Fae Myenne Ng read excerpts from her award-winning book, Orphan Bachelors, illustrating events of the 9/11 from her perspective. Fae stated that “a story is a fact” unlike how “a secret is a manipulation of story” and reads her own story of a former high school classmate of hers, Betty Ong. Betty Ong “was the first person to alert the authorities about the terrorist attack” and Fae illustrates “recording of the last eight minutes of her life” as a voice that “becomes an echo tunnel inside [the listeners’] ears.” Following Fae’s presentation, she shared in the Q&A, “A language that is lost can still be a powerful feeling….A story doesn’t ever fix anything, but it can be a road onward.”
Natalia Brizuela provided great introductions and questions highlighting the interlocking relationships between the two writers in their work, values, and identity. Honing onto Tehmina’s writing and creative process, Natalia shares how “the relationship of…poetry and facts is really about a kind of listening practice…[that] is also related to being porous…Not only the world of our current events, which are dramatically messy, but just the world itself is filled of contingencies and unexpectedness. And so being open to that is also being open to being inhabited by some form of undiscipline.”
More information about these artists, their bios and websites, can be found on the event page.
This event was hosted by the Arts Research Center and supported by the Dean’s Office of the Division of Arts and Humanities.
